SKKN Some suggestions on how to use language games in speaking lessons for 11th Grade students

TABLE OF CONTENTS
 PAGE
TABLE OF CONTENTS....................................................................................1
A. INTRODUCTION..........................................................................................2
I. Rationale of the study.........................................................................................2
II. Aims of study....................................................................................................2
III. Scope of the study...........................................................................................3
IV. Research questions..........................................................................................3
V. Methods of the study........................................................................................3
B. DEVELOPMENT...........................................................................................4
I. Literature review.............................................................................................4
1. Communicative language teaching................................................................4
1.1. Definitions of CLT.........................................................................................4
1.2. Characteristics of CLT...................................................................................5
2. Speaking...........................................................................................................5
2.1. Definitions of speaking..................................................................................5
2.2. The importance of speaking...........................................................................6
2.3. Common speaking activities..........................................................................6
3. Motivation........................................................................................................7
3.1. Definitions of motivation...............................................................................7
3.2. Types of motivation.......................................................................................8
4. Overview of language games..........................................................................9
4.1. What are language games?.............................................................................9
4.2. Types of language games.............................................................................10
4.3. Why use games in language teaching...........................................................11
4.4. When to use games.......................................................................................12
4.5. Language games as a motivator for students to speak.................................12
II. Sample games used in speaking lessons.....................................................13
1. Warm-ups........................................................................................................13
2. Pre-speaking stage...........................................................................................15
3. While- speaking stage......................................................................................15
4. Post- speaking stage .......................................................................................16
III. Results..........................................................................................................17
IV. Recommendations.......................................................................................17
C. CONCLUSION AND PROPOSALS..........................................................18
REFERENCES..................................................................................................19
A. INTRODUCTION
I. RATIONALE OF THE STUDY
Nowadays, English assumes as a more and more important part as a means of international communication than ever. Therefore, in some recent years, the focus of teaching has been promoting oral skills in order to respond to the Students’ needs for effective communication.
However, due to some objective and subjective reasons, teaching and learning English in general and teaching and learning speaking in particular does not come up to the study aims. In spite of teachers’ efforts to provide students with opportunities to develop their communicative skills, how to teach and learn speaking effectively is still a challenging question to both teachers and students at many high schools in Vietnam. 
At Nguyen Quan Nho high school, for most students they find speaking especially important yet most challenging one. It has been proved that some students got into a habit of learning “mute English”, which is obviously harmful to a language learner. It also seems to me that the techniques exploited during a speaking activity such as: role plays, simulations, discussions are not really effective. Therefore, it is a necessity to find a supplementary technique used in teaching speaking. Games can help teachers to create contexts in which the language is useful and meaningful. It can be realized that the common tendency of these methodology writers is that teachers should be more active in using classroom activities to help students recycle lexical items. One of the most recommended activities is games.
According to many teachers, games are highly motivating, competitive and fun. Games also bring a relaxing atmosphere and create more opportunities for students to practice . Through games, students will enjoy themselves, be stimulated and get involved in speaking. As a result, they can learn new lexical items faster and remember better. 
With so many advantages, games seem to be an effective way in teaching and learning a foreign language in general and speaking. 
All the above mentioned reasons and factors have inspired me to conduct a research titled "Some suggestions on how to use language games in speaking lessons for 11th Grade students ”.
II. AIMS OF THE STUDY
The study is aimed at:
- Investigating the situation of teaching and learning speaking to the 11th graders in classroom.
- Investigating the effectiveness of using games in teaching speaking to the 11th graders at Nguyen Quan Nho high school.
- Providing some suggestions and implications for the improvement of speaking teaching at Nguyen Quan Nho high school by using games in addition to other techniques.
III. SCOPE OF THE STUDY
The study focuses specifically on using games in teaching speaking to the 11th graders at Nguyen Quan Nho high school in Thieu Hoa, Thanh Hoa. So the study limits itself to the teaching and learning speaking only, and the subjects of the study are students from two classes (11B3 and 11B4) studying “Tieng Anh 11” textbook at Nguyen Quan Nho high school.
IV. RESEARCH QUESTIONS
With the above objectives, the research questions are:
- How to motivate the students in English speaking lessons?
- How often are games used in teaching English speaking lessons at 11th graders at Nguyen Quan Nho high school?
V. METHODS OF THE STUDY
1. Observation method: The subjects performed self-exploration research project conducted classroom visits, attended colleagues’ lessons.
2. Experimental Methods: Teachers teach test conducted on each specific purpose requires some speaking lessons.
3. Investigation method: Teachers ask questions to check understanding content assessment of the students’ lessons.
B. DEVELOPMENT
I. LITERATURE REVIEW
Theoretical background relative to the topic and surveys of articles, books and other resources relevant to a particular study topic will be presented. This part will also provide description, summary, and critical evaluation of each work quoted.
1. Communicative language teaching
The history of language teaching has shown a lot of changes in approaches and methods, which reflects the recognition of changes in the sort of proficiency learners need. Teaching a second language used to be aimed at enabling learners to read and appreciate class of literature. Therefore, any teacher who was able to reach this aim was thought to be a good teacher. 
Most learners of English nowadays desire to be able to communicate with others in the language they learn. Parallel with this change in the aims of learning English, methods of teaching has to be changed. For a long time, many language teaching methodologists have constantly looked for the most appropriate way to teach English efficiently. As a result, many language teaching methods and approaches have come into being such as:
- Grammar-translation method.
- The Direct method.
- The Audio-lingual method.
- The Audio-visual method.
- Communicative Language Teaching (CLT).
Mackey (1965) remarks that most of the methods which have ever been developed still continue to exist in one form or another as each method has its advantages and disadvantages. For example, grammar-translation method is easy to implement and cheap to administer, which makes it still be used in many classroom situations.
In my study, I only focus on Communicative Language Teaching Approach (CLT) as it is considered the current methodology and one of the most effective approaches to teach learners to speak in a second language.
1.1. Definitions of CLT
So far, CLT has been viewed differently by different authors such as Wilkins (1972), Nunan (1989), etc. According to Nunan (1989: 194), “CLT views language as a system for the expressions of meaning. Activities involve oral communication, carrying out meaning tasks and using language, which is meaningful to the learner. Objectives reflect the needs of the learner including functional skills as well as linguistic objectives. The learners’ role is as a negotiator and integrator. The teacher’s role is as a facilitator of the communication process”. It is thought that this definition contains aspects that are common to many other definitions.
Margie S. Berns (1984), an expert in the field of communicative language teaching, writes in explaining Firth’s view that "language is interaction, it is interpersonal activity and has a clear relationship with society. In this light, language study has to look at the use (function) of language in context, both its linguistic context (what is uttered before and after a given piece of discourse) and its social, or situational, context (who is speaking, what their social roles are, why they have come together to speak)" (Ann Galloway. “Communicative Language Teaching: An Introduction and Sample Activities”. cal.org ).
1.2. Characteristics of CLT
The communicative approach can be said to be the product of language educators and linguists who became dissatisfied with the Audio-lingual and Grammar-translation, which could not enable learners to communicate in the culture of the target language. David Nunan (1991) points out five features of CLT:
- An emphasis on learning to communicate through interaction in the target language.
- The introduction of authentic texts into the learning situation.
- The provision of opportunities for learners to focus, not only on language but also on the learning process itself.
- An enhancement of the learner’s own personal experiences as important contributing elements to classroom learning.
- An attempt to link classroom language learning with language activities outside the classroom.
These five features are claimed by practitioners of CLT to show that they are very interested in the needs and desires of their learners as well as the connection between the language as it is taught in their class and as it is used outside the classroom. Under this broad umbrella definition, any teaching practice that helps students develop their communicative competence in an authentic context is deemed an acceptable and beneficial form of instruction. Thus, in the classroom CLT often takes the form of pair and group work requiring negotiation and cooperation between learners, fluency-based activities that encourage learners to develop their confidence, role-plays in which students practice and develop language functions, as well as judicious use of grammar and pronunciation focused activities.
2. Speaking
2.1. Definitions of speaking
Speaking, as Bygate (1997) definites, involves not only the use of the right sounds in the patterns of rhythm and intonation, but also the choice of words and inflections in the right order to convey the right meaning.
Speaking, a productive skill, is known to have two main types of conversation namely dialogue and monologue, which are rather different. In monologue, you give uninterrupted oral presentation while in dialogue you interact with one or more other speakers for transactional and interaction purposes.
It is noticeable from the two productive language skills that speaking is different from writing in both processing conditions and reciprocity conditions. “First, spoken language is affected by the time limitations, and the associated problems of planning, memory, and production under pressure. Second, it is reciprocal activity, which has crucial effect on the kinds of decisions to be made” (Byagte, 1997: 11-12).
2.2. The importance of speaking
In social contexts, social roles are likely to be taken by those who learn and know how to speak, but not by those who do not have this skill. In language learning, speaking plays an utmost important role among the four language skills (listening, reading, speaking and writing) since it helps to identify who knows or does not know a language. Pattison (1992) confirms that when people mention knowing or learning a language, they actually mean that they are able to speak the language. It can not be denied that speaking deserves as much attention than written skill. In order to carry out many of the most basic transactions, it is necessary for learners to speak with confidence.
2.3. Common speaking activities
A variety of activities can be used to develop speaking skills. Below are some common ones.
* Role play
“Role-playing” is one method of getting the students to imagine they are someone else and play the part (Shi Zheng, 2006). Doing role-play activities is a way to practice, or rehearse, situations that may happen in real life. The purpose of this is to prepare the students for the real-life language use (Gu Yueguo, 1998: 89).
In addition, role-play will be the most commonly used method to ensure that the students can use effectively what they have learned in the real communication (Gu Yueguo, 1998: 239). Richards suggests that collaborative communication activities such as role-plays have the following characteristics:
They provide opportunities to practice strategies for opening, developing, and terminating conversational encounters. 
They require learners to develop meanings collaboratively. They necessitate the use of turn-taking rules.
They practice use of conversational routines and expressions.
They involve learners in different kinds of roles, necessitating use of different styles of speaking.
They require negotiate completion of tasks.
They involve information sharing.
They focus on comprehensible and meaningful input and output.
They require a high degree of learners’ participation. (Richards 1985: 83)
* Information gap activity
Teachers are often searching for activities to make their classroom more interactive; language teachers in particular are also looking for activities that promote target language use. Info Gap activities are excellent activities as they force the students to ask each other questions; these activities help make the language classroom experience more meaningful and authentic. This section will explain in more detail what Info Gap activities are and why they are useful, it will also give some examples of Info Gap activities for any language classroom.
What is an Info Gap activity?
An Info Gap activity takes place between students, not between a student and a teacher, though a teacher can certainly demonstrate the activity. The two students will be asking each other questions to which they don’t know the answer; these questions are called referential questions. The goal of the activity is for the students to discover certain information, whether about the other person or related to a specific activity.
What are referential and display questions?
A referential question is a question to which the person asking does not know the answer. For example, you might ask a new student: “Where are you from?” or “What is your name?”. The teacher does not know the answer to these questions; the purpose of asking these questions is to discover information, similar to the Info Gap activities.
A display question is a question to which the person asking doesn’t know the answer. For example, you might ask a student: “What colour is my sweater?” or “Do I have long or short hair?”. The teacher clearly knows the answer to these questions; the purpose of asking is to promote student speaking, or to prompt students to remember certain information (whether it be vocabulary, grammar, etc.)
Why are Info Gap activities useful?
Info Gap activities are useful because they are very meaningful. All students are involved in the process equally and they are all moving towards a specific purpose. Each student has the task of finding out certain information, and therefore must find a way in which to ask for this information. Motivation is usually quite high in these activities. These activities help move the students from working in a more structured environment into a more communicative environment. They are hopefully using lots of the target language, and in the process discovering where they have gaps. Knowing where these gaps are gives them a direction in which to improve.
3. Motivation
3.1. Definitions of motivation
There have been so far many researchers on the theory of motivation. Each author has his/her own way of explaining what motivation is since they look at motivation from different angles. However, motivation is generally defined as an abstract concept used to describe the willingness of a person to expand effort to reach a particular goal. For language learners, mastery of a language may be a goal. In linguistics, sociolinguistics and second language acquisition, a number of language learner motivation models have been postulated.
Motivation is an important affective variable in SLA, and it has a positive correlation with second language achievement and proficiency, that is to say, motivation of high levels often leads to high L2 achievement and proficiency. The motivated learners are usually more active in learning, while unmotivated learners are more likely to cause classroom disturbances. However, motivation is extremely difficult to define and measure. Atkinson (cited in Arnold, 2000: 13) defined motivation as “a cluster of factors that “energize” the behavior and give it “direction”.
Thus, in Atkinson’s point of view, motivation is a term used to describe what energizes a person and what directs his activity, energy and direction. While Dornyei and Otto regarded motivation as a function of a person’s thought and defined it as “the dynamically changing cumulative aroused in a person that initiates, directs, coordinates, amplifies, terminates and evaluates the cognitive and the motor processes whereby initial wishes and desires are selected, prioritized, operationalised and acted out” (cited in Dornyei, 2001: 9). In his word, Ellis stated that “motivation involves the attitudes and effective states that influence the degree of effort that learners make to learn an L2” (Ellis, 1997: 75). Woolfolk (2001: 366) also defined motivation as “an internal state that arouses, directs and maintains behavior”. Similarly, Brown (2000: 160) indicated that “motivation is some kind of internal drive which pushes someone to do things in order to achieve something”.
It can be seen that different researchers approach